Once upon a time, if you were looking for me, odds are I was either at school, at The Corn Cob Couch, or on my way to Sour Candy—a head shop, novelty store, and music exchange full of everything you’d ever want and nothing you’d ever need, crammed into about a thousand square feet. I liked the art books, all deviant and transgressive stuff, on the bottom shelf near the door. Shanna liked the scented candles in glassware printed with “The Saints of Rock” or “The Saints of Science”—Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain, and Robert Oppenheimer done up like they were Catholic saints with robes and raised palms and serene faces. There were wind-up toys, ball gags, flavored condoms, plastic models from Japan, posters, bongs and hookahs, vintage ash trays, boxed magic tricks, a rack of used cassettes and LPs, and an entire wall of candy. But I’m not sure how much money they made from all of that. I knew it as the safest place on Long Island to get rave drugs. It was where I got my first hit of 2C-B, back when I had student loan money and plenty of time for that kind of thing. It was also, I was sure, where Rog had gotten the cherry cordials injected with Absinthe that had kept a group of us tripping all night in my apartment.
I looked up at the hand-painted sign over the door, made from the rear-end of a 1967 Buick. It hadn’t changed. I wasn’t sure if that was good or bad. I pushed in and the door jingled weakly, like even the bells were stoned. I walked around a rack of colorful luchadore masks and saw Abel Rawls lean forward in his chair behind the counter. It squeaked loudly.
“Well, shit. Lookit dis.” He had to weigh 300 pounds at least. He was Haitian by ancestry and had a bald head and a black beard that ambled unevenly across a heavy face. There was a small votive altar on his desk where tiny candles burned before the six-inch statue of an island god.
“Foley!” he called to someone in the back. “Get your mick ass out here and check this out.”
Abel was known as Kingfish around town, or just Fish if he liked you. He had a fat, pinkish scar one millimeter over his right eye which he hid with dark sunglasses, even at night. Word was, if you ever saw the scar, or his eyes, you knew you were in trouble. Not that I ever had. He was sitting behind the counter in a brass-studded, high-backed maroon leather office chair, like something you would’ve seen at a bank in 1975. One of the wheels was busted, so it wobbled oddly as it rocked. The leather was torn at the corners and worn and cracked on the arms.
A tall, skinny white guy with bad teeth and slicked-back hair stepped through the curtain of beads.
“What’s up, boss?”
He was in a white T-shirt. His eyes were totally bloodshot.
“This is Spence, man, the chick I was telling you about. The one with the sick tatt.” Fish turned to me. “Mick here thinks this weak shit on his arms is gonna get his scrawny ass laid.”
Mick showed me his arms. He was in the process of getting sleeves done. The usual motifs—snakes and flowers and skulls and shit.
“It’s nice,” I said noncommittally.
“Thanks,” Mick said.
Fish slapped his hands together and laughed like I’d just told the best joke he’d heard that year. “She don’t mean it, you fool.” Fish motioned to my side. “Show him.”
“Come on, Fish,” I whined.
He made mocking noises. “Woman, I ain’t ask you to show him your snatch.”
I sighed. Kingfish wasn’t the type of man you said no to. Especially if you were about to ask him for information. I lifted my T-shirt on my right side and showed them my tattoo. Most of it anyway. It ran from my upper thigh and up my side to the back of my shoulder in one fluid black-line piece.
A sliver of hard candy fell out of Mick’s mouth and stuck to the counter.
“See?” Fish said. “That’s what I’m sayin’. Now that’s a masterpiece. Not your dumbass—”
“Can we talk?” I asked, shirt raised.
“Hold on, I gotta get a picture.” He started for the back, as if he’d left his phone there despite that I could clearly see it on the counter. “Pull them jeans down a bit so he can see the rest.”
“Fish!” I objected.
“What is it?” Mick asked, leaning closer. “Like a peacock or something?”
“Naw!” Fish seemed more offended than I was. “Ya dumb mick. It’s a phoenix.”
“Phoenix?” He got even closer. “Where’s the fire?”
“Actually, it’s a fenghuang,” I explained. “A Chinese phoenix. Lots of feathers. No fire.”
“Tell him about the ink,” Fish said as he pushed through the chains of beads dangling in the doorway. He walked with a pronounced limp.
“What about the ink?” Mick asked.
“It’s nothing. He’s making a big deal of it.”
“Does it like glow in the dark or something?”
“Umm. No?”
I started to pull my shirt down, but then I remembered Fish wanted a picture, so I stood there awkwardly, half-disrobed, as Mick leaned over the bar to get a closer look at my side.
“It’s just, they mix it themselves,” I explained. “In the shop. It’s like a really old recipe.”
“I didn’t know inks had recipes.”
I could feel the air from his breath on my skin.
“In the East, ink comes in a powder that you mix with water in a bowl to do calligraphy and stuff. With a brush.”
There was a loud noise in the back.
“You’re from the East Side?” he asked, standing straight again.
I was starting to think Mick was tripping balls. I was also pretty sure Mick wasn’t his real name.
“Used on pirates and shit,” Fish said as he emerged from the back, as if we were still stuck on his last comment. “Goes back like five hundred years ago, man. I’m telling you, this thing is legit. I mean, look at that. It’s like it could come to life or some shit.”
He held up a Polaroid that I would’ve bet all ten grand of Luke’s money that he took it off a hipster on the street—as in lifted his fat fists and stole in broad daylight.
“I been telling all my people about that thang. Now I can show,” he said with a satisfied sigh. He was breathing like he’d just run up three flights of stairs.
“Seriously?” I said. “You’re gonna put it on the wall?”
Behind the counter to my left, near the hall to the bathroom that said “For Employees Only,” was a wall full of photos, stickers, dirty postcards, magazine cutouts, ticket stubs, and one very important yellowed condom that the original owner insisted had been inside Sophia Lauren “when she was hot,” or so the handwritten note informed us.
There was a click and a snap and whine as the paper ejected.
“What you worried about?” Fish’s voice went up two octaves. “That’s the greatest fucking tattoo in the city, woman.” He shook the print. “Alright. Come on back, Spence. Let’s get you straightened out.”
That’s what Fish said when he was going to sell you drugs.
“I’m not here for that,” I objected.
I followed him through the beads and down the short hall to the office. The walls were stained and scuffed. Someone had punched through the drywall in one spot. The flattened red-pattern carpet looked like it hadn’t been vacuumed in an ice age, and there were all kinds of random crap stacked at the sides and corners, leaving only a single narrow walkway. The musty smell of rot was strong enough even to overpower the mix of hash smoke and incense. He plopped into a different office chair, equally old, which groaned under his weight. The back of the room was stacked nearly to the ceiling with all kinds of odds and ends. It would’ve taken months to sort through it all.
“I’m looking for somebody,” I said.
“Oh yeah? Who dat?”
I took out the photo of Lily and her tattooed beau.
“Recognize her?
“Nope.”
I saw his face. “What about the guy?”
He glanced quick and turned back to the broken beads he was fiddling with. “Naw.” He was trying to get the string through the tiny hole, but his fat hands were shaking.
“You didn’t even look,” I said, holding the photo closer.
“Twenty mill people in this city, woman. I don’t know every one.”
“They were customers,” I countered.
“What you want them for?” he asked, still missing the hole with the string.
“Just to talk.”
“Yeah? What about?”
If I told Fish the truth, he’d want a cut. Maybe even the whole reward. If I lied, he’d know it. Fish had a sixth sense about that kind of thing.
While I was contemplating my response, he reached for an unlabeled bottle and poured himself a glass. I’m pretty sure it was straight rum. I could smell it.
“I just need to talk,” I said.
“So talk. Man ain’t no slave.”
“Come on, Fish. You said it yourself. Twenty million people in the metro. I need to know where to find him.”
“See, now that’s different. Man goes lookin’ for trouble, it ain’t for me to say. But you asking me to ship it.”
The photo was slowly developing. I reached over and picked it up to look.
“What are you saying? I’m trouble?”
You could totally see my sideboob. I tossed it back.
“Took my boy six months to get straight after you dumped his ass. You ain’t seen what he went through.”
He meant my ex, Derek, who was Fish’s main distributor among the upscale hipster crowd. When someday Derek dies, I expect the hipsters will elevate a constellation in his honor. I met him, like so many others, at The Corn Cob Couch. I had seen him around—there weren’t many Asians—and thought he tried a little too hard, but in an endearing kind of way; I wasn’t exactly queen of the social graces. His whole demeanor changed when Shanna introduced us. I thought it was really sweet and hooked up with him that night. We went out again and he just kept beaming the whole time. When someone likes you that much, it’s easy to get swept up. It wasn’t until weeks later that I realized he had our whole future planned: wedding at the drive-in with a slasher flick playing in the background, honeymoon in some Mexican border town sharing hookers and doing every kind of drug known to man, home to a loft in a working-class neighborhood where he would make artisanal glass, maybe a kid or two down the line. Adopted, of course. It was unnatural—the worst kind of fatal obsession—and when the inevitable happened, he cratered.
After hearing through some mutual friends that he had basically disappeared, I went over to his place—on the excuse of returning his key—and found him strung out on God-knows-what. Nearly catatonic. He’d hung all Gundam figurines, which he’d collected as a teenager, as a kind of effigy to his youth. He’d strung them from the ceiling with tiny nooses of braided toilet paper. I made him puke in the toilet and stayed with him until morning, which only made things worse. Hope rekindled that I cared about him after all and there was some slim chance we’d get back together.
I did care about him. Just not in that way. In the end, I had no choice but to ghost him.
“I can guess,” I told Fish. “But remember who brought the two of you together.”
He clucked his tongue and I pressed my case.
“That whole line of business is because of me.”
“Look at this.” He reached to a box on the floor, one of several, and removed a small midnight blue glass vial. He handed it to me.
“What is it?”
“The man’s latest.”
I ran my fingers over the glass. “Derek?” There was some kind of liquid.
“Naw. That man you lookin for.”
Fish was telling me whatever business he was doing with Lily’s boyfriend was more important to him.
“What is it?”
“Potion. Good for what ails you, know what I’m saying?”
“Potion?” I ran my fingers over the vial. “Jesus. Microbrews and beard oil weren’t enough? What’s next? Carrier pigeons and whale oil lamps?”
He laughed. “Try it. Might set you right. How long since you got high?”
“No comment.”
“You tighter than a church lady’s ass, Spence.”
“No, thanks.” I set the vial down. “I just wanna talk. Cut me some slack, man. I just got half naked in front of a total stranger.” I lifted the photo as if it were Exhibit A.
“It was very nice to meet you,” Mick called from the front.
I think he put the same wet candy back in his mouth. That’s how Fish sold his rave drugs—mixed in hard candy just before it went into the cooling pan, then smashed with a hammer and sold by weight. Kids could take it to raves without their parents suspecting.
“Why you so cagey about this?” I asked. “You know I’m not exactly a threat.”
“Ain’t him I’m worried about.”
“Come on. You know I can take care of myself.”
Fish shook his head. “Not with these guys, you cain’t. You don’t know, Spence. These guys ain’t part of your world.”
“My world? What is this guy like an alien or something?”
He just made a tsk sound and sat back, like I wasn’t getting it.
“How about you just give me a hint?” I said, knowing he was very superstitious. “If I don’t figure it out, it wasn’t meant to be. Or we could ask that little god you keep up—”
Fish leaned forward and slammed a fist down so hard on the table that the photo fell off. I retrieved it immediately to keep from having to look at him. My heart beat in my chest.
Kingfish was a businessman and always nice to the customers. But he was not a man to cross. Anyone who did got the sad end of a bicycle chain. According to several mutual acquaintances, one of Fish’s victims, someone who had seen him without his glasses, had to have reconstructive surgery.
Maybe this was a bad idea.
The photo was fully developed now, and I pretended to be engrossed in it. In fact, it had actually been some time since I’d seen my tattoo in any detail. Its location and my height made it difficult to see anything but the top in my bathroom mirror. And yet, there was a time I went out of my way to admire it. It really was excellent work, flowing and richly detailed.
I handed the Polaroid to Fish, whose fat clenched fist was still pressed to the table.
“Here. Take it. For your stupid wall.”
I didn’t set it down. I held it out so he would have to take it from my hand, and I kept holding it until my arm started to tire.
He lifted his fist and snatched it, and I stood to leave.
“You really gonna keep looking? No bullshit?”
I froze. “If I say yes, are you gonna beat me with a bicycle chain?”
He looked up at me then and smiled. I could see his teeth. “Wouldn’t do no good,” he said.
“Oh?”
He turned to the photo. “You’d just come back.”
“Am I really that annoying? Don’t answer that.”
He sighed, deeply. “You just gonna cause more trouble by asking around, so I’ll tell you. But after this, we through. I don’t see you no more, Spence. Got it?”
My heart started slowing. It seemed I was not about to be beaten to death. “Got it.”
“Beggar’s Row,” he said.
I squinted. “Never heard of it.”
“Not surprised. Folks on The Row like to keep a low profile. Not an easy place to find.”
“So where do I look?”
“Not where. How. Lotsa things in this city, if you know how to look.”
He studied me from under his dark glasses. Then he shook his head then like he wasn’t sure about what he was doing.
“You better not give me regrets.”
He said it like regrets were the clap.